This old computer wizard is learning new tricks and thought I'd share as I go along. In this case I am exploring how best to set up a blog/choice to update company news easily for an html-based site. I'm trying it out with Blogger.
I'm not a huge fan of WordPress when it comes to it being slow as heck and limited in your ability to develop it. So I went looking for an alternative for a site I am making for a friend.
She had been putting news by manually updating a static site using Dreamweaver. Since that isn't super efficient I imagine she probably hasn't really been updating it as often as she could have.
At least, I know I wouldn't have.
Plus there is no way for anyone to subscribe to her news releases unless she takes the extra step to re-post it in facebook.
So my goals here were:
- Set up an easy blogging system to update her site with news
and ideally:
- Have it update facebook and possibly other similar sites automatically
Let's see what I learn...
<Time passing>
<aaaand... done!>
Okay - that was significantly easier than I figured. I thought I was going to have to put together a REST API. Which, actually, to be fair - would not have been that hard compared to other API's I have worked with. Blogger's API is super well documented and you can use API key instead of OAuth if it's public information. So I would have been able to do it that way with a bit of programming.
But I found an even easier way:
I just used an iFrame.
Bam. I'm done. I set it to width 100% and height = "1400px". It's not perfect, but for the quickie website I am putting together it's an easy solution.
It has scroll bars which at first I thought don't look fantastic and I almost ditched them with a little CSS but then realized readers might want to scroll back to earlier blog/news posts. Plus it makes it so she can write as much or as little as she likes.
To share it to facebook or twitter it's literally one click and she can put the link in an email if she wants as well. Super easy-peasy. People can subscribe. And if, say, the pro at her bowling center wanted to write a blog with advice he could monetize it. They could update it when league standings change. Shout out to fun times that is echoed on facebook too... why it's a simple solution that brings her site into the 21st century social media marketing WITHOUT a giant site-slowing beheamoth like WordPress.
I love it when a plan comes together :)
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